Google backslides on federated instant messaging, on purpose?

http://www.fsf.org –
Google users can still send subscription requests to contacts whose
accounts are hosted elsewhere. But they cannot accept incoming
requests. This change is akin to Google no longer accepting incoming
e-mail for @gmail.com addresses from non-Google domains. That would be
unthinkable.by John Sullivan, Executive Director, and Ward Vandewege, CTO
Update: Google has now done the right thing and corrected this problem.
Earlier this year, we announced an instant messaging service for our
members
using Jabber (XMPP). This service is federated, so like email, you can
talk to people whose accou
(General)

sendxmpp is a perl-script to send xmpp (jabber), similar to
what mail does for mail. Obviously, to use sendxmpp , you need a jabber
account; they are freely available at jabber.org, but you can also run
your own server.